Sleight of hand: The political success and economic failure of job training policy in the United States

For the past 20 years, job training has been promoted as the US Federal Government’s primary labour market policy for improving the employment opportunities of low‐income Americans. This essay provides new findings from the US labour market and from training programme evaluations to suggest that the focus on training as a primary anti‐poverty strategy is radically mistaken. Training has overwhelmingly failed, and its failure appears to be due to structural economic constraints rather than programme design or implementation problems. On close examination, US training policy seems to function less as an economic policy aimed at alleviating poverty than as a political strategy for insulating both private employers and public officials from the popular backlash against downsizing.